quote: Original post by TMAN
I dunno, maybe there will be a real contender to Microsoft, but then does anyone still use any Novell products? How many people on this forum have any experience with Novell products?

I have lots of experience with many Novell products. Thier NOS is massively superior to any NT or *nix system for this purpose (primary file & print serving). The NW disk management is light-years ahead of NT/XP and on-par in capability with advanced experimental unix file systems but NSS is proven running on thousands of production servers.

There''s two things that are bad about it. The Windows client is a bug-ridden bastard (supicions are high that MS takes aim at it), and the last two versions of NW were administrated by crappy Java applets (poor in responsiveness and poor in thier capability to perform maintaince task. e.g. you can only select one user at a time, with the old Win32 native software you could select multiple users at a time. The old-old DOS software was very responsive, you didn''t have to drink a cup of coffee waiting for "Console One" to load or wait for the editbox to catch-up to what you typed).

MS, as usual though, is making steady roads into all of those features plus with AD. Group Policies and the new WMI Filters for AD app deployments on 2003 are a nice road in. Add in ADSI with scripting, you can manage your entire directory with VBScripts (I like Python though).

Not knocking Novell, they were there first, but as usual MS just picks and chooses what they want, and push it out with massive marketing power. Though, those Java apps are slooooow. At least the last time I used them with consistency about 3+ years ago. Hopefully they''re better.

But, having an easy to use administration of Unix and Windows machines (and Macs *grin*) would be a great niche market for mixed-environment companies...which is what I suspect will be the norm for the future. I think most companies are realizing they can''t standardize on one platform and hope to meet all their IT goals with speed and cost.

Just my 2 bits. =)

Int.